Category Archives: Conferences & Events

Microsoft Belgium At The Speed of Light, Traffic At A Glacial Pace, AD FS 2.0 , Vittorio Bertocci & a Large Chocolate Bunny

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Wednesday April 27th 10:45

We’re helping out on the infrastructure side of a claims based authentication project with my team and I had some questions on AD FS 2.0. The two lead developers (U2U Consult’s Kris Vandermotten & Stefan Gevaert ) also had some outstanding questions or rather they needed a echo chamber to discus some design choices.  Now imagine you have TechDays 2011 going on in your country and Vitoria Bertocci (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbertocci/, @vibronet ) is over there to present a decent amount of sessions and is available to the attendees for questions.  OK I have two people of my ICT team running around to broaden there horizons but I’m at the office holding the fort. Kris says he saw Vittorio the day before but missed an opportunity to talk to him on Tuesday.  I’m thinking & saying , yeah I should mail him. I really should. Why haven’t I yet?

Wednesday April 27th 14:20

Kris & Stefan suggest to go to Antwerp and meet up with Vittorio. I’m thinking like, good plan but how do we get this set up so fast? Mail? Nah, what if he isn’t able to read it.  We need an other approach. I decide to use two channels. Twitter and telephony. One tweet (with a very fast response from Vittorio) and some phone calls to Microsoft employees I know might be at TechDays 2011. The first two are not there that day but Arlindo Alves (@aralves) is. I get him on the phone very quickly (note that he is extremely busy during an event like TechDays) and ask him if we can set up a meeting with Vittorio. He says he’ll ask and will get back to me. Well it’s 15:00 hours and we have a meeting set up for 10:00 hrs Thursday morning. Wow Smile Now I’m impressed with how fast this went from “let’s try” to reality.

Thursday April 28th 08:00 hours

We’re leaving in Gent to go to TechDays at Metropolis in Antwerp.

Thursday April 28th 10:05 hours

We arrive at Metropolis. Wow again but not in a positive way. I’m not impressed at all at the “speed” we got to Antwerp. I’m not even sure if you can call what I witnessed driving anymore. But hey, there is a reason I love telecommuting, riding my bicycle to work and using the train to commute.

Thursday April 28th 10:10 hours

We start a very interesting and fruitful talk with Vittorio about our project. He’s extremely knowledgeable on the subject, passionate about the technology and he loves to help people understand and use it better. We’re happy with what we learned and the talk ends with us keeping our promise to Arlindo & Vittorio. We brought Belgian chocolates. Now, we didn’t exactly manage to get “pralines”, it was a bit larger (http://twitpic.com/4qglxb). For some reason we think he’ll remember us when we send him a follow up mail.

Lessons learned. If you need to talk to some one at Microsoft don’t be afraid to ask. Also be willing to act fast and to grab an opportunity because people like Arlindo Alves from Microsoft Belgium are very good at making them happen!

BriForum Europe 2011 & The Experts Conference Europe 2011

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Great news from the educational & conference front. First of all, I’m attending BriForum in London, United Kingdom in May (http://briforum.com/Europe/index.html).  That’s good news, normally we’d have to pop over the big pond to go to that one, so this is pretty neat. And timely, due to some prospecting I’m doing for Disaster Recovery,  Business continuity, application aware storage in a virtualized environment It’s a good match and I hope to get in to some educational discussions about the challenges we all face. Some of the storage vendors we’re interested in are there as well so there is certainly some potential to make it a good experience.

And just recently confirmed that The Experts Conference is coming to Europe. TEC2011 Europe will be held in Frankfurt, Germany from October 17th to October 19th 2011. This conference is high quality and created to fill the needs of the most experienced users, which is one of the reasons I would like to attend. The more you learn & grown the more you bump into the next level of challenges and being able to learn form high level content and interact with experienced speakers and attendees who are dealing with the same issues can be very rewarding. Attendees of TechEd have a way to measure the level of the sessions, well, they are all supposed to be Level 400 only. Quest is hosting this, so they certainly should be able to round up the expertise.  I’m going to make it to the new “track” at this conference and that’s “Virtualization & Cloud”. More information can be found here http://www.theexpertsconference.com/europe/2011/virtualization-cloud-training/overview/

The timing of these conferences is pretty good. As I said we’re doing a lot of prospecting right now and hope to get a lot of information from attending these. For anyone interested why I attend conferences and why I think they are valuable see mu blog post on this subject https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/06/05/why-i-find-value-in-a-conference/

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1 & 2012 Béta Available

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Good news, today March 2nd, 2011 System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1 went RTM. I’ll update this short post with the download link when it becomes available ==> UPDATE: download it here from Microsoft (Evaluation) or from your TechNet subscription or licensing site. Seems like we got all host & guest updates to W2K8R2SP1 done exactly on time to get this one installed and have a state of the art, up to date infrastructure. Today the 2012 Beta version became available for download (here) and the documentation site went life (here). Things are moving in the system center space. Busy times ahead! Yet 2 more  VMs to test with I the lab … and than Denali is coming.

No TechEd Europe 2011

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Well it’s official. There will be no TechEd Europe in 2011. A quote from a Microsoft mail for Tech Days Belgium “… Since you have been attending TechEd Europe previously we wanted to inform you in person that Tech∙Ed Europe will not return in autumn 2011, but later in 2012.  …“

We’ve lost IT Forum a couple of years back and with no TechEd Europe in 2011 this means a barren landscape void of any major international Microsoft technical events in Europe. I think that’s a shame. The opportunities to network & interact with Microsoft employees, engage in passionate interactive discussion about technologies, solutions and  possibilities  with colleagues and peers from around the continent are sadly missing from my agenda this year. I always enjoyed to learn about their creative solutions to similar problems in an environment that is focused on what we love to do, where learning opportunities are abundant and the atmosphere is all about technology. I haven’t missed one in 10 years, sometimes against the odds.

To me TechEd is a key moment in the year. I use it to check my compass and adjust my bearings when needed. A good technical conference is a great place for both advancing what your are doing and reflecting on what can be done and remains to be done. Communication of visions, roadmaps and technology are paramount and I feel that I have lost the one event left we had as technologists in the Microsoft ecosystem in Europe that was our place to go and do that. As a good colleague touched upon. What’s Microsoft’s strategy and approach to what & when to communicate with it’s European audience? Local Events only? They are good, needed and of high quality but no substitute.  I’ll need to find another way to zero in my course this year.